A Man's Hearth Part 14

"Anthony, can one be _too_ happy and affront the fates?"

"No."

"We can go on and on, and nothing will happen!"

"Please G.o.d!" said Tony Adriance with perfect reverence.

"It is not a wonderful adventure now; it is just life?"

"Of course. I say--I wish that van-driver could see me now--the one I told you about last night."

"The butcher gave me the kitten, Anthony."

"Of course he did; any man would give you all he had. What were you singing when I came in?"

"How should I know? I know a thousand bits of song and a thousand stories, and they march in and out of my head. Our dinner is spoiling, Mr. Adriance."

"I love you!"

"I dislike you!" she mocked him.

There was no one in New York who would have quite recognized either Anthony or Elsie Adriance in these two children at play together.

"Next Sat.u.r.day evening I want you to take me shopping, please," she told him when they were seated at supper.

"Enchanted; but why Sat.u.r.day?"

"Because you will have your wages then, naturally. We need more dishes, and a ca.s.serole, and a ribbon for the kitten, and--thousands of things."

"Shall I have wealth enough?"

"Plenty; we are going to the 5-10-20 cent store."

"I thought those were the prices of melodrama on the East Side."

"Wait. You may find the event even tragic, if I want too many seductive articles," she cautioned him. "But let us not talk of mere things--aren't you going to tell me about your day?"

"I am. But it was a day like any other workingman's, I suppose; nothing happened."

"Did you want anything to happen? I imagined----"

"All I want," said Tony Adriance fervently, "is to be left alone, with you."

CHAPTER IX

THE LUCK IN THE HOUSE.

Nothing did happen. None of the traditionary usual experiences overtook the two in the little red house, as November ran out and December stormed in like a l.u.s.ty viking from northern seas, attended by tremendous winds and early snow.

In the first place, the marriage of Anthony Adriance, Junior, somehow escaped the sensational journals, as a pleasing theme. There were no headlines announcing: "Son of a millionaire weds a nursemaid." No reporters discovered the house on the Palisades, to photograph its diminutive Gothic front for Sunday specials. Adriance had written a letter of explanation, so far as explanation might be, to his father.

That was on the morning of his marriage, and as he had given no address, naturally he had received no answer. There were no reproaches and no pursuit.

Nor was Tony Adriance gnawed by vain regrets. According to every rule of romance and reason, he should have suffered from at least brief seasons of repining; at least have been twinged by memories of things foregone, yet desired. But he felt nothing of the kind. Masculine independence was aroused in him, and held reign in riotous good spirits.

With a boy's triumphant bravado he faced down cold and hard work, delighting in the victory. He rose early and built Elsie's fires before permitting her to rise, while she sat up protesting in the four-posted bed as he bullied and loved and mastered her. He walked two miles to and from work morning and evening, and drove his big motor-truck eight hours a day. Moreover, he gained weight on the regime, and the springing step of a man in training. He never had suspected it, but his whole body had craved outdoors and employment of its forces; Nature had built him for work, not idleness. The atmosphere in which he had been reared was, by a trick of temperament, foreign to him.

"I'm plain vulgarian," he laughed to his wife one morning as he started to work. "I would rather drive one of my father's trucks and come home to your pork-chops, than I would to dawdle around his house and dine with a strong man standing behind my chair to save me the fatigue of putting sugar in my own coffee. Are you going to have some of those jolly little apple-fritters with b.u.t.ter and cinnamon on them for supper to-night?"

She made a tantalizing face at him. It was two days before Christmas, and so cold that her lips and cheeks were stung poppy-bright as she stood in the doorway.

"Of course not; now I know that you want them. We will have cold meat.

What are you going to give me for my stocking, Anthony?"

"A cold-meat fork," he countered promptly. "How did you know I meant to give you anything?"

"I didn't," she calmly told him. "But I am going to give you something, so I thought it only kind to remind you."

He swung himself easily over the railing and smothered her in an embrace made bear-like by his s.h.a.ggy coat.

"The chauffeur's peerless bride shall not weep," he soothed her. "For ten days her ruby stomacher has been ordered by her devoted husband.

Now let your Romeo depart, or his pay will get docked next Sat.u.r.day."

She lingered in his arms an instant, her s.h.i.+ning dark hair pressed against the rough darkness of his cheap fur coat.

"Anthony, don't they ever notice your name, down there? Didn't they ever ask about it?"

"Surely! The first day I went in, the superintendent asked if I were related to Mr. Adriance. I told him yes, a poor relation. True, isn't it? He was satisfied, anyhow. They call me Andy, down there."

"Andy!" she essayed experimentally. "Andy! It goes pretty well."

They laughed together, then he gently pushed her toward the door.

"Go in," he bade, with his commanding manner; the manner Elsie had taught him. "You will take a royal cold out here, and then what should I do for my meals? I have to eat if I am to labor; besides, I like my food. What did you call those cakes we had this morning?"

"'_Belle cala, tout chaud!_'" she intoned the soft street-cry of old New Orleans' breakfast hours, her voice catching the quaint, enticing inflections of those dark-skinned vendors who once loitered their sunny rounds freighted with fragrant baskets. "Some day I will show you what I call a city, sir; if you'll take me?"

"I'll take you anywhere, but I'll not let you go as far as the next corner. Now, go in-doors, and good-bye."

She obeyed him so far as to draw back into the warm doorway. There, sheltered, she stayed to watch him swinging down the hill through the gray winter morning. It was nearly seven o'clock, but the sun had not yet warmed or gilded the atmosphere. Bleakness reigned, except in the hearts of the man and woman.

They had been married two months. Elsie Adriance slowly closed the door and turned to the uncleared breakfast table. But presently she left the dishes she had begun to a.s.semble, and walked to one of the rear windows.

There she leaned, gazing where Anthony never gazed: toward the gray-and-white stateliness of New York, across the ice-dotted river. She contemplated the city, not with defiance or challenge, but with the steady-eyed gravity, of one measuring an enemy.

Two months, and the victory was still with her! Yet, she warned herself, surely some day New York would call. She never quite could forget that.

She herself was not unlike a city preparing for defence, feverishly grasping at every stone to build her ramparts. How she envied Lucille Masterson her beauty, the elder Adriance his wealth, since those possessions might have bound Anthony closer to her! She recalled Mrs.

Masterson's exquisite costumes, colored like flowers and as delightful to the touch; the costly perfumes that made all her belongings fragrant; the studied coquetry that kept her like Cleopatra, never customary or stale. To oppose all this, Anthony's wife had only--her hearth. For she never would keep her husband against his will; Elsie Adriance never would claim as a right what she had held as a gift.